Kickstarter fatigue?

In 2012 Kickstarter and crowdfunding rose to become the new, great hope for smaller independent studios. Campaigns were launched and millions were gained by those with an idea that was easy enough for gamers to appreciate and visualise (nostalgia, spiritual successors, and the likes are naturally easier to grasp).

Now there seems to be a lot less optimism. Chris Taylor expressed his disappointment as the Wildman campaign failed. Asking for $1.1 million for a rather novel (and hard to grasp) concept may seem like asking for too much, but in all honesty I doubt Gas Powered Games have been involved in a smaller production (budget-wise) in the last decade. If Kickstarter becomes a game of "how low can we go?", then it's very doubtful it will allow for the best possible game experiences to out of it.

Campaigns will fail on Kickstarter. Most of them will in fact fail. But for a while there it seemed every high profile developer who went on Kickstarter came out of it with a big bag of cash. Still, most of those bags are significantly smaller than the value of a publisher contract for a similar concept. The upside of this is easy to spot. If you manage to produce a game of high enough quality through this process - the developer comes out of it owning the IP and able to take a much larger cut of the profits when it goes on sale across various channels.

For example, had Project Eternity been signed by your typical game publisher - then Obsidian would have been paid for their work as they completed a set of milestone deliveries. Then as the game went on sale they would likely start getting royalty check once the game had sold a million or more copies.

The difference now is that Obsidian will make a large chunk of money with the first copy sold of Project Eternity on Steam (granted Valve takes a cut, but still, this is a far better scenario). Maybe some developers will have to go to the bank and take out a loan to complete their Kickstarter projects, but there is tremendous upside to owning your own work in the longrun.

So what about the fatigue? Are people growing tired of sending their money to projects on Kickstarter? That's probably true to some extent. We're still doing it, but as there are more projects to choose from and we still have yet to see most of the high profile game release - people are probably holding on to their cash a bit more. But looking at Dreamfall Chapters as a current example - there is certainly possibilities out there for developers who want to create something gamers know they want.